Wednesday, November 16, 2011

977. I know someone was saying they wanted me to rage about this one but I really can't say anything I haven't said countless times before: Randall is pandering. He's pandering to map nerds. He's pandering to the sort of nerds who wear Vibram Five-fingers because they think of it as hacking for their feet--really, most of these are pandering to some category of nerd or another. It's a list of panderings. I don't personally care enough about maps to, you know, care, so whatever.

978. This one, though, is stupid. I've been making this joke for, oh, several years now--it's not difficult to use Wikipedia to create reality. It's not surprising that this happens, because, despite the fact that your garden variety internet moron will declare that you are really dumb if you link to a Wikipedia article to prove or assist a point, Wikipedia is broadly useful, though not, perhaps, good to rely on.

This is not a novel concept, and he doesn't really do anything interesting with it. "It turns out that Wikipedia cites authors whose source is Wikipedia sometimes!" Yes, and? Did you just now discover this potential?

The alt text is even worse. While I don't doubt that his claim is plausible, his refusal to identify which book and which author just makes it sound like he's making it up. To put it into perspective, it's sort of like if he said "yeah, I totally had this hot celebrity chick over and she let me drink her milk, it was totally hot. She's really famous and you all know her, but I'm not going to tell you which one it is because I value her privacy." Sure, it's technically possible that someone saying this is telling the truth, but it's far more likely they're just telling a lie that you can't go and verify.

Mythbusters sucks. I've only seen a few episodes. In one of them, they were busting the "myths" in Kill Bill, like "can you actually stand on a sword and kick somebody in the face?", or "can you actually punch your way out of a coffin?". Um, no. It's a fucking fictional movie. Nobody believes that stuff can happen. What's next, mythbusting Lord of the Rings? "Can a ring actually make you invisible"?

Plus at least 1/3 of the episode is endlessly recapped filler. At the beginning of the show they go over what myths they'll be busting. Before a commercial break they take a couple minutes to give you teasers about the results of their mythbusting. After the commercial break they remind you that some results will be shown before the next commercial break, then they take a couple minutes to recap what they were doing before the commercial break. At this point the take a couple minutes to present some fresh content, then whoops, another commercial break is coming up, time for more teasers.

The map one shows a lot of work for Randall, and is for his fans, really. It's mildly amusing, which is all I think xkcd really aspires to. It highlights what I really think about xkcd: not that it "sucks" but that it's "not for me, if it ever was."

Whichever of Carl or Rob said it is basically Randall's picto-blog was precisely right, and that has not changed.

The last one that really, truly sucked for me was the banana equivalent dose one. That was the height of pretentiousness if you actually know anything about bananas and their radioactivity. Which RM doesn't - he was passing something along he just didn't "get."

If the latest one is consciously self-referential it's okay, I guess. If not, it's actually funny in the laughing at you not with you sense.

Since Randy has Megan on his mind 24/7 I can name names with a non-she (well, partly) that did exactly what RM's talking about in several papers as well as a report to Congress. Namely, George Mason U's statistics professor Edward Wegman:

Mythbusters fell into basically the same trap that XKCD did: they're both pretty much by their very natures things that can't help but appeal to nerds, and long outlasted the point where they were relevant or interesting. In Randall's case it's because he's just not that funny, or at least not capable of being funny on a regular basis. With Mythbusters it's because there's a finite number of urban legends they could test on their show before resorting to "bust a 'myth' from a movie that only an especially impressionable 12-year-old might seriously think was plausible".

Would also like to point out that the latest South Park episode was entirely devoted to this phenomenon. Albeit with the History channel citing itself as a source. I get the feeling Randy saw the episode replaced history channel with Wikipedia and thought 'Gold'

This latest one is another one of those lame pandering ones. Yes, Randy, we've all run into programming issues and googled them and found someone else with the same problem from years ago and no solutions. And yes, it sucks. If someone from work was complaining about that tendency, I would nod in agreement. But I don't go to a webcomic to have someone say something I agree with. I go there, in theory, to find humor.

Next xkcd will be a guy holding his arm and a caption: I hate when I hit my funny bone.

Wow, first wikipedia citations, and now finding unsolved problems on the Internet. Two incredibly tired jokes in a row. Did Randy finally run out of ideas and now he's just going through reddit's top submissions?

Ravenzomg!, you seem like the kind of plain girl with slightly low self-esteem but an obvious desire to express herself and make an impression who would be really pleasing in bed. Do you have any more pictures of yourself which would allow me to decide whether this fantasy is worth considering?

Those Vibram Five-Fingers look pretty interesting and I'd actually like to try them out. I just wonder why they don't offer a design which conceals the toe design under a discrete film of leather. Do they really not conceive of a market for people who wouldn't associate prestige with looking like a toy monkey?

To quote one of the tropers on that thread:"It discourages new members. You've all seen the creepy stuff in the troper tales archives, and it tends to make outsiders think we're all like that. Thus, a lot of potential members get scared away."

Oh well, it seems I'll never get to tell the world about my Badass Longcoat.

What the hell is this?

Welcome. This is a website called XKCD SUCKS which is about the webcomic xkcd and why we think it sucks. My name is Carl and I used to write about it all the time, then I stopped because I went insane, and now other people write about it all the time. I forget their names. The posts still seem to be coming regularly, but many of the structural elements - like all the stuff in this lefthand pane - are a bit outdated. What can I say? Insane, etc.

I started this site because it had been clear to me for a while that xkcd is no longer a great webcomic (though it once was). Alas, many of its fans are too caught up in the faux-nerd culture that xkcd is a part of, and can't bring themselves to admit that the comic, at this point, is terrible. While I still like a new comic on occasion, I feel that more and more of them need the Iron Finger of Mockery knowingly pointed at them. This used to be called "XKCD: Overrated", but then it fell from just being overrated to being just horrible. Thus, xkcd sucks.

Here is a comic about me that Ann made. It is my favorite thing in the world.

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